Dunne And Didion Share The Struggle Of A Writing Life

DEBORAH HORNBLOWCourant Staff Writer

The job of the writer is lonely work.

You sit at the keyboard staring at the blank screen. You battle ghosts and guerillas and windmills in your head. The job of the writer is lonely unless, in my mind, you are John Gregory Dunne or Joan Didion.

While they have had their share of solitary times at work, they have, for almost 40 years , had each other: live-in best friends, ace editors, collaborators and coffee-break buddies.

Since they met in New York (he, a younger brother of Dominick Dunne, was a writer for Time magazine, she for Vogue) and married in 1964, the two have gone on to produce numerous novels. His include "Dutch Shea, Jr.," set in Hartford; "True Confessions"; and "Panic in Needle Park." Among hers are "Play It As It Lays," "Run River" and "Book of Common Prayer."

His 1989 memoir "Harp" includes Dunne's early years in Hartford and his Irish-Catholic family's resentment of WASP social superiority: "Don't stand out so that the Yanks can see you," he wrote, "don't let your pretensions become a focus of Yank merriment and mockery."

There also were "Monster: Living Off the Big Screen" and "The Studio" for him; "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," "The White Album" and "Salvador" for her. They've written screenplays, including adaptations of their books, as well as "A Star Is Born" (the Babs-a-la version) and "Up Close and Personal" (which took eight years to make it to the screen and almost sent them to the poorhouse), and for national magazines.

It is a wonder to imagine the literary companionship. To have company in the writing process, a writing/editing/collaborating equal sleeping right beside you, seems something close to the divine.

Even in the early years of their marriage, when her star rose faster than his and he was sometimes mistakenly called "Mr. Didion," the pair remained steadfast. Dunne acts as her editor and collaborator, as she does for him. One begins a sentence and the other finishes it.

Together, they have stuck it out, and the rewards are shared history, shared but distinctly different careers and shared stories.

Writing in The New York Times, Larry Gelbart once described the secret language Dunne and Didion deploy to counter the "inanities and indignities of `creative' meetings" in Tinseltown. "When such a get-together is a true disaster, Mr. Dunne will turn to Ms. Didion, or vice versa, and say, `White Christmas' - the song played over the Armed Forces Radio Network in April 1975 as a signal to the few Americans left in Vietnam that the war was over, and that they were to bail out. For the Dunnes, it meant exactly the same thing: Let's cut our loses and split."

There have been times when that title might have been spoken of the marriage. In "The White Album," Didion famously wrote that they were in Hawaii "in lieu of getting a divorce."